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In Her Place: Secrets and lies

Albert Shin co-wrote and directed "In her Place," a Korean story of surrogacy and three women. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star)

Hae-yeon Kil plays the mother of a pregnant girl, Ahn Ji Hye, in Albert Shin's In Her Place.

A little eavesdropping in a cafe in South Korea inspired Toronto director Albert Shin’s In Her Place, a deliberately paced and beautifully shot drama about three Korean women, a secret pregnancy and the heartbreak that results.

Already earning early attention — including a mention on TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey’s Mission List of 16 worthy films still lacking a theatrical distributor — In Her Place has its world premiere at TIFF Saturday and screens again Sept. 9 and 12.

“It was like (this) restaurant, about as loud, and just like this table,” Shin said, gesturing to the busy lunchtime crowd around us at a Bloor St. eatery while describing the “very, very heated” debate he overheard in South Korea a few years ago.

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The topic was a woman they all knew. One group insisted she was pregnant. The others said that was impossible.

“Whatever I could gather from what they were talking about through osmosis, it was like, oh, this is one of those secret adoption situations,” Shin recalled.

“It’s taboo because they put such (emphasis) on bloodlines in Korea,” explained Shin. “If you adopt a child, or the child is not of your flesh and blood, you are kind of seen as … a defective person that can’t give birth,” he said. Adopted children “grow up marginalized or even bullied because you were ‘abandoned’ as a child; your parents aren’t your real parents. That’s the stigma.”

From that exchange came the inspiration for the micro-budget, Korean-language Canadian film that the 30-year-old York University film school grad spent years planning and about nine months shooting on a “borrowed” farm in South Korea. He serves as director, co-writer (with Pearl Ball-Harding) and co-producer.

It’s his second feature film, following Krivina, which he made with producing partner and fellow York grad Igor Drljaca. That film, which Drljaca directed, had its world premiere at TIFF 2012.

With In Her Place, Yoon Da-Kyung stars as a wealthy Seoul woman who, desperate to have a child, arrives at an isolated farm where a struggling widow (Hae-yeon Kil) hopes her teenage daughter’s pregnancy can be transformed from a shameful accident into a beneficial situation.

The woman moves in with the mother and daughter to wait out the birth. She tells friends she is pregnant and explains her absence by telling them she and her husband decided she’ll have the child in the United States.

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Untrained actress Ahn Ji Hye plays the morose and rebellious pregnant teen, who clearly has her own emotional problems.

“I didn’t want to make a film that was about a cultural topic per se; I wanted it to be about the characters and the individual people,” said Shin. “I didn’t want it to be a soapbox film, where I talk about what I’m trying to hammer people over the head about. This is not right or this is wrong; I didn’t want to pass judgment.”

Shin wanted especially to avoid passing judgment on issues surrounding adoption. He was more interested in the dramatic potential.

“I thought the characters were fascinating — the moral ambiguity, and these characters that, in one way, are coming together for a purpose where everybody wins, sort of, if everything goes as planned.” he explained. “I was exploring that.”

Shin, who said his Korean fluency is “about 75 to 85 per cent,” found he needed a writing partner, not to help with language but rather to ensure “that I didn’t stray from having a … female perspective, making sure I’m not just going off on my own fantasy world.”

Enter Ball-Harding, who helped Shin with problems he had “cracking the code, so to speak.”

Shin, who has wanted to be a filmmaker since childhood, used to watch the live TV feeds of TIFF press conferences as a youngster growing up in Newmarket. He said “it’s incredible” to have his movie premiere in Toronto.

“As a kid I dreamed of being a filmmaker, but also making films that could play at the Toronto Film Festival, making this a career,” he said.

“I hope to be doing this 30 years from now. So it’s obviously having TIFF support the movie and selected for its world premiere is a dream come true.”

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